hand you could take without a blush. But there was no redeeming grace

about the other, who called himself sometimes Hay and sometimes Tomkins,

and laughed at the discrepancy; who had been employed in every store in

Papeete, for the creature was able in his way; who had been discharged

from each in turn, for he was wholly vile; who had alienated all his old

employers so that they passed him in the street as if he were a dog, and

all his old comrades so that they shunned him as they would a creditor.

Not long before, a ship from Peru had brought an influenza, and it now

raged in the island, and particularly in Papeete. From all round the

purao arose and fell a dismal sound of men coughing, and strangling

as they coughed. The sick natives, with the islander's impatience of a

touch of fever, had crawled from their houses to be cool and, squatting

on the shore or on the beached canoes, painfully expected the new day.

Even as the crowing of cocks goes about the country in the night from

farm to farm, accesses of coughing arose, and spread, and died in

the distance, and sprang up again. Each miserable shiverer caught the

suggestion from his neighbour, was torn for some minutes by that cruel

ecstasy, and left spent and without voice or courage when it passed. If

a man had pity to spend, Papeete beach, in that cold night and in that

infected season, was a place to spend it on. And of all the sufferers,

perhaps the least deserving, but surely the most pitiable, was the

London clerk. He was used to another life, to houses, beds, nursing,

and the dainties of the sickroom; he lay there now, in the cold open,

exposed to the gusting of the wind, and with an empty belly. He was

besides infirm; the disease shook him to the vitals; and his companions

watched his endurance with surprise. A profound commiseration filled

The Ebb-Tide